The Adventures of Augie March (Penguin Classics) by Saul Bellow
Thea was furious at him, her face red. She shouted, “Get him! Go finish him!” But when he heard her voice he rose up and flew to her for his usual meat. Since he came to her she had to let him land and extended her arm. But she was very angry. “Oh, the dirty bastard! We can’t let him run away from a little bit of an animal like that. What’ll we do? Augie, don’t you grin about it!”
“I’m not, Thea, it’s the sun making me squint.”
“What should we try now?”
“I’ll pick up the lizard and call Caligula back. The poor thing is almost dead.”
“Jacinto, kill the lagarto,” Thea said.
With pleasure the boy ran from the shed on bare feet and hit the creature on the head with a stone. I laid it, dead, on my gauntlet, and Caligula didn’t refuse to come but he wouldn’t eat. He shook the lizard with fury and let it drop to the ground. When I offered it a second time, now a dusty dead thing, he did the same.
“Oh, that damned crow! Get him out of my sight!”
“Now, Thea, wait a minute,” I said. “This has never happened to him before.”
“Wait? He only came out of an egg once. How many times did he have to do that? He’s supposed to have instincts. I’ll wring his neck. How is he going to fight the big ones if a little nip does this to him?”
“Why, if you’re hurt, what do you expect?”
But that was my humanizing again, and she shook her head. She believed fierce nature shouldn’t be like that.
I put the eagle on his waterbox, and gradually Thea let me pacify her. I said, “You’ve done wonders with this bird already. You can’t miss. We’ll make it, sure. After all, he doesn’t have to be as terrible as he looks. He’s still a young bird.”
At last, in the afternoon, she got over her anger and proposed for the first time that we go to Hilario’s bar in the zócalo for a drink. While she was unpleasantly stirred against Caligula I felt a little condemned with him.
Though Thea was specially loving when we went into the room to change for Sunday p.m. in the zócalo. She took off her clothes. The outer were rugged, the inner silky. And when she was naked, smoking a cigarette, she looked at me differently as I sat shirtless and pulled off my boots in the heated shade and the radiated color of the tiles. I went and put my head on her breast. But I knew that, both in love, we were not quite the same in our purpose. She had the idea of an action for which love makes you ready and sets you free. This happened to be connected with Caligula. He meant that to her. But as she suspected now that he preferred brought meat to prey, perhaps she thought also, about me, whether I could make the move from love to the next necessary thing.
We rose from bed and dressed. In the lace blouse she wore, how soft she looked. Her hair fell long on her back. She took my arm, not because she needed its support on the sharp cobbles, but to keep close, and in the shade of the fruit trees she looked very much as she had in St. Joe on the swing, a young girl.
Since the Fenchels had owned the Acatla house for many years Thea was acquainted in the town. But at Hilario’s bar we sat at a small table; she didn’t want company. Nevertheless, people came over to greet her, to ask after her sister, her aunt and uncle, and Smitty, and of course to give me the once-over. Many of these remained. Thea continued to hold my arm.
To my Chicago eyes these others mostly looked far and odd. Now and then Thea explained who or what they were, and I didn’t always understand her. So then this bald old German had been a dancer, and on this side was a jeweler, and the blonde, his wife, came from Kansas City; here was a woman of fifty who was a painter, and the man with her was a sort of cowhand, or Reno-cowhand; and coming up now was a rich fairy, once a queen. Here was a woman who opened a mouth of intelligence on you; she seemed to look at me severely; I thought, at first, because I had taken Smitty’s place. Her name was Nettie Kilgore, and she turned out to be not bad at all, only sometimes impatient in look, and something of a lush. She didn’t care a hang about Smitty. Well, I’d known plenty of grotesque people before, but none who had made it their life’s specialty. The foreign colony of this town represented Greenwich Village, or Montparnasse, or the equivalent from a dozen countries. There was a Polish exile, there was an Austrian with a beard, there was Nettie Kilgore; there were a pair of writers from New York, one named Wiley Moulton, the other, his friend, simply called Iggy; there also was a young Mexican, Talavera, whose father owned the taxi service and rented out horses. A man who sat near Iggy turned out to be the second husband of Iggy’s first wife. His name was Jepson and he was the grandson of an African explorer. Well, all this was new to me, and so it went. While Thea and I, fresh from bed, sat side by side. It was curious amusement and didn’t much touch me. I was nearly as much entertained by the kinkajou Hilario had in a cage and I fed it potato chips. This large-eyed little animal.
I felt flattered when people assumed I was the eagle’s master. Of course I said, “Oh, Thea is his real boss,” but people seemed to feel that only a man could cope with a bird of that size. All except the handsome brown strong young chap, Talavera, who said he knew how good Thea was with animals. I didn’t altogether care for his contribution to the conversation, though I have to admit he looked to be in a different class from the rest of this gang. I couldn’t get over their queerness. The person who sat next to him seemed to have a kind of bony crest to the middle of his head, and the back of his hand was like the instep of another man’s foot—white, thick, and dead-appearing. Then Nettie Kilgore. Then Iggy, red-eyed. Then a man I secretly named Ethelred the Unready—like Grandma Lausch or Commissioner Einhorn, I would sometimes do that, give a name. Then Wiley Moulton, the weird-story writer. He was big-bellied and long-haired; his face was sort of subtle, with brown lids; his teeth were small and tobacco dyed; his fingers seemed all back-bent at the last joint.
There was hard work in some of these people, that they made the most partial little good climb around in tremendous mountain ranges of opposition to prove itself.
“So you’re going to catch these monsters with your bird?” said Moulton.
“Yes, we are,” said Thea quite calmly. It was a great thing about her that she could not be swayed to make small changes of plan or views in order to get on with people. “I don’t like monkey games,” she always said.
“It has been done,” I observed.
And now again the public band in the zócalo, just below, began to pound and smite, so the air quivered with the ragged march. It was nearly twilight. Young people promenaded, but in rapid time, so you felt flirtation and desperate flying, both. Firecrackers jumped in the air. A blind fiddler played and howled, with dance-of-death scrapes, serenading the tourists. Then the cathedral started to ring the bells, the deepest voice of that big, crusted sadness. So with this noise the conversational people were silenced for a time; they drank their beer or knocked off their shots of tequila with tastes of salt licked from the thumb in the stylish Mexican way and bites of lime.
Thea wanted Moulton’s help with the articles; when you could hear your own voice again she asked him about that.
“I’m not in that line now,” he said. “I make more by sticking to Nicolaides.” Nicolaides was the editor of the pulp magazine Moulton contributed to. “I had a bid to go up and interview Trotsky last month and I let it go because I’d rather write for Nicolaides. Besides it takes all the strength I’ve got to turn out the installments.”
I felt that Moulton had in store all kinds of words and in fact would say anything. Anything! He only waited for the conversation to give him the chance.
“But you did write magazine articles at one time,” said Thea, “and you can show us how to do it.”
“I take it Mr. March is not a writer.”
“No.” I answered for myself.
What he was fishing for was my calling. I suppose he knew that I didn’t have one I could announce even to these worldly people—for I imagined they were of the great world, and they just about were. Moulton smiled at me, and not without kind
“Well, in a pinch maybe Iggy can help if I can’t.”
Moulton and Iggy were friends, but this recommendation everybody knew was a joke, because Iggy specialized in blood-curdlers for Doc Savage and Jungle Thrillers. He couldn’t write anything else.
I liked this Iggy Blaikie. His real handle was Gurevitch, but that didn’t have the dash that went with the proud Anglo-Saxon names of his heroes. So as Gurevitch was abandoned and Blaikie had never been real in the first place he became entirely Iggy. He had a real poolroom look. The boy with the bucket in Nagel’s corner, a little weavy and punchy himself. He wore an apache jersey and a pair of the rope-soled sandals from the Chinese shop; he was lean but his face was flushed and gross, with bloodshot green eyes and mouth of froggy width, the skin of his throat creased, dirty, half shaved; his voice was choky and his conversation only part coherent. Except by someone experienced in sizing up such people, who would have known he was innocent, he might have been taken for a dope peddler, a junk-pusher, or minor hoodlum. His was a case of a strongly misleading appearance.
As to young Talavera, I didn’t know just what to make of him. It was obvious that he looked me over measuringly, and he made me conscious, from the outside, of how I seemed, with tanned face and freestyle hair. I felt foolish somewhat, but I had to grant after all that I had studied him too. I wasn’t experienced enough to be suspicious of the young man and native of the place who attaches himself to the foreign visitors, especially to women. Such are the broke characters to whom ancient names belong, in Florence in front of Gilli’s Café, or the young men in tight pants who wait around at the top of the funicular in Capri for Dutch or Danish girls to pick up. And if I had been that experienced I might not have been quite right about Talavera. He was a mixed type. Very handsome, he looked like Ramon Novarro of the movies, both soft and haughty, and was said to be a mining engineer by profession; that was never proved but he had no need of work, his father was rich, and Talavera was a sportsman.
I said to Thea, “I don’t think that young fellow likes me much.”
“Well, what about it?” she answered carelessly. “We’re only renting horses from his father.”
For Caligula we first tried a burro, but though he stood hooded on the saddle and was well secured, the burro was bowed with terror and its head bristled. We then tried horses, and they were shy of him. I couldn’t keep my seat when Thea handed Caligula up to me. And she herself wasn’t more successful. Finally Talavera Senior brought out an old horse who had been through the Zapatista rebellion and wounded in guerrilla battles. To be ridden by a picador was all this gray animal appeared fit for, and be gored in the ring. But he was first-rate with the eagle. I would have said myself there was more sorrow than anything else in his accepting the bird on his back. Old Bizcocho, that was what this horse was called; it was hard to make him go at more than a fast amble, though he still had a few bursts of speed in him.
We took him out of town to a flat place, first, to practice. Out beyond the cemetery and its bones that lay accidental on the ground, the reek of flowers along the white tomb walls: first I on the gray animal who clopped slow, the eagle braced on my arm; then Thea on another horse; and Jacinto in his white sleeping-suit garb and dark feet carried just above the ground riding a donkey. We would pass a funeral, often of a child, and the father himself with the casket on his head would step out of the road—so would the whole cortege, musicians included—and with his eyes, like the milk of blackness, a few Mongolian mustache hairs fine and long on the savage bulges of his mouth, even afflicted, and while inimical, would follow the eagle as he passed. There would be the same whisper, “Mira, mira, mira—el águila, el águila!” So we’d pass by the white stones and walls that scaled in the heat, the iron prickles, the bones of death, the sleepers’ clothes flappy and humiliated at the back; and also the little fever-slain child that rode inside.
We got up to the plateau, from which the town lay half covered in a picturesque hole, and there practiced with Caligula to get him used to a take-off while in motion. When he learned that, Thea’s confidence in him entirely came back. In fact we did it well. He sat on my arm, I stirred old Bizcocho to move faster, and the eagle took hold strongly with his feet and wrung me through the demon’s glove. I struck the hood and then slipped the swivel—I had to drop the reins to do this and grip with my knees—and Caligula put forward his breast with a clap of the huge wings and started to take the air.
In a few days Bizcocho was ready, and in tremendous excitement, one morning, we went out for the giant lizards. Jacinto came with us to flush them out of the rocks, and we climbed down the mountainside to their tropical place. There the heat was thick; it collected stagnant in the rocks, which were soft and eaten by rain acids into grottos and Cambodian shapes. The lizards were really huge, with great frills or sails—those ancient membranes. The odor here was snaky, and we seemed in the age of snakes among the hot poisons of green and the livid gardenias. We waited, and the cautious kid went to poke under leaves with a long pole, for the iguanas were savage. Then on a ledge above us I saw one who looked on, but as I pointed him out we saw the Elizabethan top of him scoot away. These beasts were as fast and bold as anything I had ever seen, and they would jump anywhere and from any height, with a pure writhe of their sides, like fish. They had great muscles, like fish, and their flying was monstrously beautiful. I was astonished that they didn’t dash themselves into pellets, like slugs of quicksilver, but when they smashed down they continued without any pause to run. They were faster than the wild pigs.
I was anxious for Thea. I knew what a state she was in. The place was steep, there was no room to maneuver, and she wheeled and plunged her horse. I had the burden of the eagle, and the old Zapatista gray couldn’t turn fast though he was game enough and understood taking chances. So I heard more than I saw most of the time.
“Thea,” I shouted, “for Chrissake, don’t do that!”
But she was crying something to Jacinto and at the same time waved to me to get into position. She wanted to get the lizards driven down a slope of stones where they had no cover. Sometimes silver, sometimes dusty, gray, statue-green they looked as they flew. Finally she signaled me to strike the eagle’s hood and slip his leash. I took a lurch, Bizcocho started downslope on the loose rocks, Caligula gripped me; I slipped the drawstring and took off the hood, drew the swivel, and he went up, forward in the deep air of the mountainside, once again up toward the high vibrations of blue. Coming and going in stages, he went to a great height to wait on.
Thea sprang to the ground to seize the pole from the boy. He was just sweeping it through the thick growth and tore off magnificent flowers as red as meat that tumbled down in the wave of ferns, and he cried, “Ya viene!” An iguana fled down the rocks. Caligula saw him and made his pitch. Feathered and armored he looked in his black colors, and such menace falling swift from heaven. Down the iguana made his pure leap too, crashed, ran, doubled at Caligula’s stoop, slithered from the snatch of the talons, rolled, fought over his belly from the shadow that haunted him so fast, flew again. I saw the two sharp fierce faces, and as Caligula put his foot on the monster it opened its angular mouth with strange snake rage and struck the eagle in the neck. Jacinto cried, and Thea even shriller, at this sight. Powerfully Caligula shook, but only to get free. The iguana dropped and fled, glittering its blood on the rocks. Thea yelled, “After him! Get him! There he goes!” But the eagle didn’t pursue down the slope; he landed and stood beating his wings. When the thrashing of the lizard couldn’t be heard any more he folded them. He didn’t fly to me.
Thea shrieked at him, “You stinking coward! You crow!” She picked up a stone and flung it at him. Her aim was wide; Caligula only raised his head when it struck above him.
“Stop that, Thea! For the love of God, stop! He’ll tear out your eyes!”
“Let him try to come at me, I?
“Maybe the thing hurt him.”
“No, he was the same with the little one. He’s scared.”
“Well, he’s gone. He beat it.”
“Where?” She tried to look, but I reckon couldn’t see well for the tears. And I wasn’t any longer sure, either, which of various spots in the sky he was.
“I hope he flies to hell!” she said with a shiver of anger. Her face burned. At his fraud, that he should look such a cruel machine, so piercing, such a chief, and have another spirit under it all. “Is he hurt if he flies like that?”
“But you threw rocks at him,” I said. And once again I felt implicated, because he had been tamed on my arm.